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Firework photographs are generally pretty uniform in their appearance: a dark sky, glowing sparks that are either points or lines depending on exposure time, and perhaps some views of the surrounding area. When photographing a major fireworks show last week, photographer Rob Shaw of BackFromLeave Photo wanted to do something different. He played around with various camera techniques and captured a set of firework images that is quite different than most of the images you'll see online.

Back in May, we shared a useful and interesting program called set.a.light 3D STUDIO. The software allowed users to test out lighting setups digitally in a virtual studio, saving them the time and effort of testing them out in real life.

Want to capture images of a scene that's lit purely with candlelight? You can now rent a pair of Zeiss f/0.7 lenses -- two of the largest aperture lenses ever seen in the history of photography.

Conflict photographers like Michael Kamber and Louie Palu have spent years covering the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. They've lost friends, been very nearly killed themselves, and come back with incredible (and sometimes hard to stomach) photos.

This weird looking contraption is a homemade adapter that lets you shoot digital photographs with a smartphone through the viewfinder of an SLR. Photographer Michael Amos built it a couple of years ago using a camera eyepiece and a smartphone case.

From the moment of its announcement, Hasselblad's Stellar camera's purpose has been controlling the damage done by the same company's Lunar crash landing. The latter camera is (was?) a ridiculous thing as noted in my Hasselblad Lunar review.

In October 2012, astrophotographer Raymond Collecutt of Whangarei, New Zealand shared a new (and risky) idea he was playing around with: converting a standard DSLR into a sharper monochrome camera for photographing space.

Ever since photography was invented in the 1800s, there have been people willing to risk life and limb to bring images to the public eye. Among the craziest examples are prisoners of war during World War II -- people who built makeshift cameras out of smuggled parts in order to capture what life was like inside their prison camps.

Camera makers narrowed the point-and-shoot market down to a couple of basic designs some years ago, and ever since it's been one variation after another on slim-and-silver or megazoom brawn. But oh, back in the day...

People will do just about anything to alleviate their anxiety. During the last year of writing my doctoral thesis, the worry about being able to finish grew increasingly heavy. The relentless grind of research, constantly being told that your work is inadequate, and believing that 80-hour workweeks are average has its tolls on all students. Once you reach the edge of this process and are pulverized into oblivion, you get a nice, shiny PhD.

So you think you have a good reason or excuse to use a photo you found on the Internet without asking the photographer who took it? Let’s see if it can stand the test.

What would we think the surface of Mars looks like if NASA had equipped the Curiosity rover with a smartphone loaded with Instagram or Hipstamatic instead of the advanced scientific cameras they chose? Greek photo enthusiast Nikos Kantarakias decided to find out.

Want to own a piece of photographic and space exploration history? An original Hasselblad 500EL Electric Camera kit has appeared on eBay. This is the camera NASA astronauts used on the moon for its Lunar Apollo Missions.

Nokia Lumia users now have a way to easily transfer images and videos to and from their devices with the freshly-released Photo Transfer application -- released today. That's not to say it wasn't simple to transfer normal photos in the past, however. Users have been able to use an app such as iPhoto previously to move images over to their computers, but Photo Transfer now allows for the transfer of additional formats.

For his project titled "Tree," South Korean photographer Myoung Ho Lee found solitary trees out in nature and then erected giant white canvas backdrops behind them. He then created photos showing the trees surrounded by artificial boxes in their natural surroundings.

Update: This giveaway is now over. The randomly selected winners have been announced at the end of this post.

A proper digital back for medium format cameras can easily set you back thousands of dollars, but a new company called Badass Cameras is hoping to disrupt that. The company says it's building an adapter that will let you use your smartphone as an uber-cheap digital back for your camera.

Have you ever covertly taken a photo of an attractive stranger when out and about in public? If you have, then you're no different than 8% of Brits, at least according to a recent survey.

Framing passersby with light and shadows is a pretty common technique in street photography, and one that we've featured a number of times in the past.

3D printing has made inroads into photography in many ways. From 3D-printed photos, to DIY flash diffusers, to a camera made entirely out of 3D printed parts, there's a lot of photographic applications to the third dimension.

The world of photography holds many untold stories of men and women who had a profound impact on the lives of the people on the other side of their lens. One such man was Dublin street photographer Arthur Fields, and an Irish production company wants to tell his story, with a little help from you.

Over the years, we've featured some truly stunning examples of time-lapse photography, but we certainly don't consider ourselves a curator of the technique. If you happen to be looking for such a service, the new website Primelapse has got you covered.

My first African experience began at age 17 when I won the 1974 Kodak/Scholastic National Photography scholarship which included a studies program to Kenya and Tanzania. For a teenager, it was an eye-opening revelation. Back then I was working an illegible night shift cooking burgers at Jack in the Box while going to high school. It was a tough gig but it made a new Nikon lens possible every couple of weeks.

UK lighting manufacturer Rotolight recently earned itself a good bit of bad press when the company allegedly used a DMCA notice to get an unfavorable video review taken down by Vimeo, sparking free speech outrage within the photographic community.

While finding it hard to hit the bars set by Lamar Odom and Kanye West, celebrities and wannabe famous people continue to pioneer new avenues for abusing photographers.

Mobile messaging service Just.me has released a new update (version 1.2) to their iOS application that brings the wonderful world of selfies and Instagram-like filters to the fingertips of its users.

Want to take better photographs using your mobile phone camera? It helps to know what you are working with. I'll assume you already know the basics for all kinds of photography (composition, exposure, focus and DOF, shutter speed, aperture, et cetera).

Are you sick and tired of switching between a video LED light and flash? Folks, it just may be that LightRight is the product for you.

In a move roundly criticized by the U.S. State Department, embattled Syrian Pres. Bashat Assad has taken to Instagram to promote jarringly bucolic images of life in the war-torn nation.

Annoyed at people who have a habit of snapping a quick food photo before every meal? There might be a scientific explanation for why some of them do so: scientists have found that that rituals such as snapping a quick food pic may actually help make eating more pleasurable for the eater.

How do us elders separate ourselves from those who only know what it means to upload? Here are 17 tools and toys you’ll immediately recognize if you still remember the heyday of Kodak. Bring on the nostalgia.

Here's a helpful safety tip for shooting action shots in or around water: if you're using your camera in a rough-and-tumbly environment, do your best to keep it at a safe distance from your face. If you don't, your face could end up looking like the one above.

Dominic Holden is the News Editor for the Seattle area newspaper The Stranger, and he was recently threatened with arrest and workplace harassment by some local police officers for standing on a public sidewalk and taking their picture.

I had the opportunity to photograph the newest dormitory on the Florida International University campus a couple of nights ago and I thought I would share a little insight on the process of lighting such a large structure.

Over the past week, we've had the opportunity to share stories that showed both the intersection of camera technology and sports, as well as camera technology and 3D modeling for video games. The video above has a little bit of both.

Canon has just very quietly released a new product that harkens back to the days of the Flip video camera. Like those camcorders, the brand new VIXIA mini is a pocket-sized video camera that gives you a higher-quality option when it comes to recording your daily life in full HD.

Take a look at that stock camera app on your iPhone. Does a fair job, doesn't it? Then SnappyCam Pro 3.0 lands on it and makes you realize how truly slow the stock app takes photos. For your reference, it's about 3-to-6 images per second at full resolution (assuming you're using an iPhone 5).

There are many cloud storage services out there, some offering a decent amount of space for very little in way of cash. Unfortunately, most aren't built with photographers and other visual junkies in mind. You can upload and store most file types, but viewing them is another matter.

Leather messenger bag-style camera bags don't come cheap. A cursory search on B&H Photo will reveal prices that often run in the $300+ range for something with decent storage space. Fortunately, Etsy seller LeftoverStudio offers a hand-crafted, high-quality alternative that will cost you half as much.

We've seen some pretty cool and trippy time-lapses before (the few "lyric lapse" videos we've shared immediately come to mind) but the Borrego Stardance above takes the cake. Mixing massive metal sculptures of dinosaurs, insects, mammoths and more with beautiful star trails and the milky way, the folks at Sunchaser Pictures have created a time-lapse truly worthy of the designation "trippy."

Panasonic has officially announced the GX7, a sleek new high-end mirrorless camera with some features that are being introduced for the first time in a Panasonic mirrorless camera, including in-body image stabilization and a tiltable electronic viewfinder.

The rumor was true -- kinda. Sigma today announced a new Mount Conversion Service for its Global Vision line of lenses that will allow photographers to convert their lens lineups to different mounts if they ever decide to change camera brands (e.g. Canon to Nikon and vice versa).

Norwegian photographer Arvid Strømnes learned a lesson earlier this week about why you shouldn't get too close to wild animals while trying to capture them on camera.

Dove Canada is getting serious about promoting Real Beauty by going after art directors, graphic designers and photo retouchers -- basically anyone who distorts body image in print. In order to fight those who they feel create an unrealistic representation of what the body actually looks like, they created a "Beautify" action that can be downloaded for free from popular editing sites. The action appears to add a "glowing skin" effect when in reality, it reverts the image back to its original, …

Every year, in the third week of July, over 100 silver bearded men descend upon the city of Key West, Florida. Their goal: to be declared the man who most resembles American writer Ernest Hemingway. The contest they participate in is put on by the Hemingway Look-Alike Society, and is the largest sanctioned look-alike competition in the world.

Remember that fake anime fighting photo fad that emerged from Japan earlier this year? Vancouver-based photographer Tanja learned recently that it sometimes doesn't mix well with wedding photography. After asking the groom and groomsmen to pose for an action-packed group shot, she snapped this memorable (and embarrassing) photo.

Being so close to the release of the 2013 Arizona State University Football campaign, I wanted to take an opportunity on to talk about an image that I created many years ago while still a student at ASU. When many people ask me where I believe I crossed the line from hobbyist to professional, I tell them of this campaign, and actually place the beginning on a single image. The fact that the image still lives on my website is a testament to how much I enjoy it and how much it means to me. It is …

A British group working to preserve the work of influential 19th-century photographer William Henry Fox Talbot has discovered previously unseen work by the innovator.

Do you remember the 320-gigapixel photo taken from atop the BT Tower in London? That 360° panorama, shot by Founder of 360-cities Jeffrey Martin, holds the title of world's largest photo. But just because you have the top spot, doesn't mean you have to stop.

When you hear the words "retro camera," you probably think of some kind of silver or black camera crafted decades ago out of solid chunks of metal. But what would a retro camera look like if you kept the design the same but replaced its metal body with wood? …